Since retiring from teaching counselling, Clive is increasing his telephone work as a counsellor and psychotherapist and his support of fellow counsellors.
Rather than specialising in particular kinds of issue or diagnoses, Clive offers an approach to them that emphasises the counselling relationship and promotes deep and lasting changes. At the same time, he is knowledgeable about and has worked with most of those 'issues'. His approach to counselling is grounded in contemporary Person-Centred practice, Experiential Focusing, and his own work in counselling theory.
Clive offers professional support and clinical supervision based in that approach, but he is open to working with people from very different traditions and orientations. He is also a philosopher and ethicist—that sometimes comes in useful when supporting colleagues.
Clive is available for workshops, training, and public speaking.
Ava Perraton MA, PG Dip Addiction Studies, Cert Person-Centred Supervision, Registered Clinical Counsellor (2823), Cert Focusing Professional
If you want an authentic, Person-Centered approach to counselling, supervision, and training, or someone to guide you in Experiential Focusing (or a personally configured combination of person-centred counselling and focusing) then Ava fits the bill.
Deeply committed to non-directivity, Ava has worked in institutional and agency-based counselling services as well as private practice. She combines Person-Centred vision with a lively sense of how the 'real world' works and extensive training and experience beyond her Person-Centred roots.
Like Clive, Ava's fifteen years of varied clinical practice mean that she knows and has worked with most kinds of 'presenting issue'. However, she is particularly familiar with domestic and women's issues, working with addictions, and working in a First Nations setting.
It was Clive's idea to leave Kamloops, BC, and train as a counsellor at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. It was Ava's idea to take the same course. UEA offered an authentic person-centred training unavailable in Canada, something that fitted who we are and what we had already learned about human beings.
Studying Process Experiential Psychotherapy (now more often called 'Emotionally Focused Therapy') was a joint enterprise. So was the private practice we developed on Magdalen Street in Norwich, not far from the Cathedral.
Clive went on to develop and direct University training programs that put in place ideas grounded in our joint experience. Ava offered clinical supervision at UEA and to the students Clive was teaching. That worked. Clive wrote about what we were doing and the ideas we jointly developed. Ava found the arguments and passages that didn't work.
It was Ava who said It's time to go home, and Clive who did some long-distance commuting until he finally agreed.
